Nearly 60 percent were minors at the time they went missing, meaning thousands of parents don’t know where their children are and if they are alive or dead.

“Every parent’s worst nightmare is not knowing where their child is. This is the tragic reality for thousands of Nigerian parents, leaving them with the anguish of a constant search. People have the right to know the fate of their loved ones, and more needs to be done to prevent families from being separated in the first place,” said ICRC President Peter Maurer today at the end of his five-day visit to the country.

During his time in Nigeria, Maurer met with Nigerian President Buhari and high-level government, civil society and business leaders and spoke with families who have been affected by conflict in Maiduguri and Monguno, many of whom have missing relatives.

Families in northeast Nigeria are often separated while fleeing attacks. Others have had loved ones abducted or detained and do not know their whereabouts. The ICRC works with the Nigeria Red Cross and other Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in the region to trace missing people by showing photographs, calling out names, and going door-to-door in camps and communities.

So far, 367 cases have been solved since ICRC received its first cases in 2013, underscoring the immense challenges that come with finding missing people and reconnecting them with their families in Nigeria. Large swathes of the northeast of the country remain completely inaccessible to humanitarian organisations. People have also been displaced by fighting many times, making them harder to find.

“What troubles me is that I haven’t heard whether he is dead or alive. I just don’t know. Whenever I cook food for his siblings, I think about him,” Falmata Amodu, the mother of a boy who went missing in 2013 at age 10 while fleeing an attack, told us. “For the three years that we stayed in Maiduguri, my husband was very distressed and would repeatedly have nightmares. He would call the name of our abducted son, ‘Alkali, Alkali, Alkali’ all the time.”

Two million people are estimated to be displaced from their homes in northeast Nigeria. In Monguno, internally displaced Nigerians outnumber residents nearly two to one. Health care is also a major concern, as health workers and medical facilities continue to come under fire. Nearly a year ago, two ICRC health workers, Hawa Mohammed Liman and Saifura Hussaini Ahmed Khorsa, were deliberately killed after they were abducted from a clinic in Rann in Borno State. These attacks on health care are not only a violation of international humanitarian law, but also an assault on people’s basic right to receive health care.

“Families are the greatest casualty of 10 years of war in northeast Nigeria. They have been torn apart. Children have been killed and maimed in bomb blasts. Their health facilities have been ruthlessly attacked and their homes and belongings destroyed. Families belong together and above all, civilians must be spared in war” Maurer said.

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“Since November we’ve seen 59,200 [displaced],” IOM Nigeria’s Chief of Mission, Frantz Celestin, said in Geneva, noting that in the last two years, “we have not seen that many people on the move”.

The last two months of 2018 were also marked by “an increased sophistication” of non-State armed groups, accompanied by “an increased number of attacks and success in taking towns”, Mr. Celestin explained.

Decade-long crisis of displacement, abduction and killings

Civilians continue to bear the brunt of conflict that has led to widespread forced displacement and violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.

Since the start of the crisis, more than 27,000 people have been killed in the three north-eastern BAY states, according to UN humanitarian coordinating office, OCHA, and thousands of women and girls have been abducted.

Government efforts to drive back the non-State armed groups that operate in the north-east of the vast country have been hindered by the Harmattan dust cloud – an annual phenomenon that sweeps across west Africa from approximately November to March.

Humanitarian hubs destroyed

In the town of Rann, which was attacked twice last month, “nobody was spared” in one assault, Mr. Celestin said.

“The MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) clinic was burned down, (the) IOM hub was attacked, the UNICEF clinic was attacked, the WHO/ICRC’s compounds were attacked,” he added.

Amid ongoing insecurity, humanitarian access is limited, hampering the ability of aid agencies to assess needs comprehensively.

Tens of thousands of civilians have fled into already overcrowded camps, mainly in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.

Overcrowding in protection camps ‘one of our biggest problems’

“One of our biggest issues in north-east Nigeria in addition to the security issues is the land, access to land,” Mr. Celestin said. “We have a number of camps that are overcrowded, in fact, if we were to take all of the camps together, we would have more than 249,000 people in camps that are completely congested, with Monguno (Borno) being the largest one of them.”

Rumours of imminent attack are enough to convince communities to flee, the IOM official explained, noting that people had sought refuge in neighbouring countries of the Lake Chad region.

“There were a number of people who moved across a number of villages in Cameroon,” Mr. Celestin said. “Some of them were returned…they crossed the border and they were turned back. And for the recent (displacement) one, I don’t have the specific numbers; I’ve heard 30,000, but I have not been able to prove it.”

In 2018, according to the UN humanitarian wing, OCHA, 7.7 million people in Nigeria were in need of humanitarian assistance, and 1.7 million people were classified as “food insecure” between October and December.

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The recipients received rice, beans, oil, salt and Corn Soya Blend in quantities that should last for five weeks. The distribution was carried out by the ICRC and community volunteers.

“People in Rann were happy to receive food. They have been isolated by rains and poor quality roads since June and running very low on food supplies” said Mohammed Sheikh-Ali, ICRC economic security coordinator. “At the beginning of January, we laid sand bags on the road for our trucks to be able to cross. We got 12 trucks full of food to Rann last week on the day of the airstrike, which prevented us to distribute. As soon as medical evacuations were over, we organised the distribution with the help of the community”.

Last week’s airstrike killed and wounded scores of people, including twenty aid workers from the Nigerian Red Cross Society.

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